The fight not to forget
Photographer Cedric Nunn describes his latest exhibition as the classic decolonising project, although it started before the term became the latest buzzword, writes Kerushun Pillay
FIVE years ago Cedric Nunn picked up a camera with a fixed 50mm lense and set out to do his part for decolonisation.
In 2012, Nunn, who is now 58, travelled to the Eastern Cape to document sporadic wars which saw the Xhosas battle the Afrikaners and the British, from 1779 to 1879.
Nunn, who was born in Nongoma, was inspired to carry out the project after a conversation he had in Germany a few years earlier.
At one of his photographic exhibitions, he got talking to the former South African ambassador to Germany, Makhenkesi Stofile.
“I chatted to him about history, and he spoke to me about the battles in the Eastern Cape.
“The more I started talking to people I knew, I realised that none of us knew much (about those wars). Then I began to get curious: Why don’t we know, how much is there that we ought to know?”
Nunn, who documented apartheid and now focuses on various photography projects and exhibitions, dedicated three years to researching the war and compiling his piece.
What began as simple Google searches of battle locations morphed into a studious escapade. “That time was spent researching, talking to students and historians.”
Nunn finally held the project’s first exhibition at the 2014 Grahamstown National Arts Festival.
Unsettled: One Hundred Years of Resistance by the Xhosa People Against Boer and British is a collection of 61 photos in grayscale, depicting locations and landmarks of the 100-year war.
It will now be displayed for two weeks at the Msunduzi Museum in Pietermaritzburg and will form part of the Maritzburg Film and Arts Festival this weekend.
“I saw the theme of the arts festival, which was about resistance. The whole thrust of my exhibition is about the heroic resistance of the Xhosa people that we don’t know about.
“I wasn’t going to be neutral; I wanted to tell it from the Xhosa perspective because that had been lost,” he said.
And therein lay a fascination that has followed Nunn throughout his career: capturing that which is ignored by the mainstream.
His numerous showings of Unsettled locally highlighted for him the disconnection South Africans have from some important aspects of their history and heritage.
“If you were to ask any high schooler to tell you what happened in 1879, they might get it that there was the Anglo-Zulu war, where the Zulus were ultimately defeated.
“But that year was the end of the Xhosa war … we all know about that (Zulu) war, but we don’t know about the Xhosa war which lasted 100 years.
“It’s very interesting to ask why: Why is it that we don’t know about it?”
Nunn calls this omission from mainstream thought “organised forgetting”, and said spreading these tales could constitute a decolonisation of South African consciousness.
“The Khoisan were deprived of an identity for hundreds of years. They became ‘coloured’ and were looked at as some sort of half-breed, but actually they were the first people here.
“It’s organised forgetting, and we are organised to forget crucial parts of our history. So even Xhosa people don’t know this incredible history.”
Nunn praised students who were making efforts to question the colonial legacy still present in South Africa – most recently through calls for decolonising of science.
“There is truth that science is a particular Western construct and it’s linked to colonisation. There was a pseudo-scientific idea that everybody believed called eugenics, which was about creating a scientific argument to justify the oppression of black people,” he said.
“The decolonial project is to remain critical and vigilant and say it’s possible that some elements of science are hangovers from colonial experiences which are part and parcel of our oppression.”
His ideas about decolonisation spread to the ongoing Fees Must Fall protests, for which Nunn is a sympathiser.
“How long have students been protesting for this? Of course nobody wants libraries to be burnt, but if we remain unresponsive to their protesting, they will become so frustrated that they act unreasonably.
“But the core unreasonableness is to expect the most unequal country in the world to pay for education. How can one ever begin to think that’s reasonable? It’s not.”
Unsettled, then, has special relevance today.
“It is the classic decolonising project, but it started before that word became hot and sexy,” Nunn laughed.